Chris Christie seeks forgiveness but won't confess his sins

Governor Chris Christie delivers his 2014 State of the State address. (Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger)

If I may state our governor’s problem in terms I recall from my days as a Catholic schoolboy, it is this:

Chris Christie made his Act of Contrition before he made a full confession.

When I was a kid, the nuns made sure we understood it’s supposed to work the other way around. You go into the confessional and spill your guts to the priest. Only afterward do you tell God you’re sorry.

The governor got it backward. Christie made light of this scandal until those Bridgegate emails broke a week ago. Afterward, anyone paying attention had to realize that his "I moved the cones myself" bluster represented an attempt to keep of us from finding out whether he committed any sins, either venial or mortal.

We still don’t know which type he committed, if any. But the process of finding out promises to be a painful one for the governor who began his State of the State address yesterday by using the passive "mistakes were made" construction commonly employed by politicians trying to obscure their roles in scandals.

The day began with publication in the Wall Street Journal of a photo showing the governor with the brains behind Bridgegate, David Wildstein, at a Sept. 11 commemoration last year at the World Trade Center site. That was the third day of the gridlock engineered by Wildstein on this side of the Hudson. Also at the ceremony were two other Port Authority officials who played roles in the scandal, then-Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni and Board Chairman David Samson.

There’s no proof the three discussed the situation in Fort Lee with Christie. But when the executive director of the Port Authority, Patrick Foye, reopened the lanes two days later and wrote an email excoriating the Jersey officials, Samson devoted his energy to blaming Foye for leaking the email to the Journal when he should have been disciplining Wildstein and Baroni for trapping those Jersey drivers in traffic.

As for Baroni, in December he tried to continue the cover-up by telling the Assembly Transportation Committee the lane closures were part of a legitimate traffic study. Christie also peddled that line right up until the emails hit the papers. So it sure looks as if they were in cahoots. That doesn’t look good for the governor, especially when the first act of the new Legislature will be to set up a joint committee with subpoena power to continue the probe.

He gave it a game try yesterday, however. Christie made proposals for property-tax reform that won applause from both sides of the aisle — except when the Democrats sat on their hands when he proposed ending six-figure sick-leave payouts to retiring public employees. Christie always scores points with the voters when he brings that one up.

He also offered a proposal likely to win him headlines, if not legislative approval. That was the call for longer school days and a longer school week. That might push Bridgegate out of top billing for a day.

But on the whole, it sure seemed like we were looking at the first speech of a governor who’s going to continue being a governor instead of moving up to the White House.

That points out the real problem with Christie’s campaign last year. It was designed to set him up for a presidential run in 2016, not a governorship that will run till 2018.

The reason the Christie landslide was without coattails was that he devoted most of his energy to proving he could pick up votes in urban areas and among minorities. That’s nice, but those districts are solidly Democratic on the legislative side. Meanwhile Christie did little for Republican candidates in swing districts in the suburbs, one of whom lost by a mere 35 votes.

Worse, the GOP’s dismal performance down-ballot led to a fight with Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr., whom Christie tried unsuccessfully to replace. That effort succeeded only in alienating Kean’s father, former Gov. Tom Kean Sr., who of late has been taking shots at his successor on national TV — and who was conspicuously absent from the row of former governors watching the speech.

Prior to Bridgegate, Christie apparently thought he had risen so high that he no longer needed the support of a mere Jersey guy like Kean. Now he’s going to need all the help he can get.

That brings to mind something else I recall from my school days. Whenever I got to acting like a wise guy, the nun would look at me and say, "You think you’ve got an answer for everything."